Binary Watch is the 1st application that I developed for the iPhone and iPod touch. I am still very proud of my accomplishment since I built it all from scratch. Looking back now though, I’ve come quite far in developing applications for the iPhone.
The Binary Watch actually started as a Mac Dashboard widget and can be downloaded from the Apple Store.
So by now you are probably wondering what a Binary Watch is? I’m sure you’ve heard of the term binary before. Binary is a base 2 counting system, consisting of 1′s and 0′s, effectively meaning on and off respectively. So on our Binary Watch, a light being on represents a 1 and a light being off represents a 0.
Each 1 or 0 represents one bit, and just 4 bits of data is all we need to represent the numbers 1 through 12. If you’ll look at the Binary Watch, you’ll notice that the top row of lights has 4 lights, each light representing a the bit 1 or 0. The bottom row however has 6 lights, representing 6 bits of data being either a 1 or a 0 depending on the light being on or off. There is a really easy way to convert this binary data into the more commonly used base 10 counting system. You can follow the table below to get an idea of how this works.
| 128 | 64 | 32 | 16 | 8 | 4 | 2 | 1 |
| 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 |
The binary number represented in the table above [ 00100110 ] is an 8 bit binary number also referred to as a byte. The numbers in the top row represent numbers that will be added together for each field that has a 1 in the bottom row. So looking at the table you’ll see that the numbers that have 1′s are [ 2, 4, 32 ]. If we add these numbers we get 38. So this means that the binary base 2 number [ 00100110 ] is equal to the base 10 number [ 38 ].
This is the same way that you would figure out what time it is on the Binary watch, you would start from the right hand side of the table and start inserting the first row of 4 bits for the hour. Since for the hour only 4 bits are used that means that we will not have values for 16, 32, 64, and 128, so these will get 0′s.
The same applies for when you are converting the minutes. Wow, didn’t really intend on this turning into a tutorial but since it did, I’m hoping that it was educational and informative. If you have any questions, feel free to comment. You can download the Binary Watch for Free from the App Store.
